DV for Teachers

» Blog Archive: 8 Cool Firefox Plugins You Never Knew Existed

This is an extension designed specifically for web developers. When you right click on a page and “start aardvark” it separates divs, tables, and other elements with a red border. This allows you to visually see the different elements of the web page and put something visual to the code you’re working with.

This is the best free tool I’ve found yet for learning how CSS works. It’s what I’m using to figure out changes to this default template I’m using. Soon enough, there will be useful links in the right column instead of someone else’s pictures from Flickr.

Looking for music to use on a Christmas podcast, slideshow, or video without worrying about copyright? Here’s a link for you. Uwe Hermann’s 10 + 100 Creative Commons Christmas Songs:

So, it’s Christmas today (or it will be tomorrow, depending on where you live). Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a bunch of freely and legally available Christmas songs you could listen to all day? Burn on CDs and hand over to your relatives? Share with your friends without the fear of being sued to death by big record labels?

Well, here’s a list of 110 128 songs which are all explicitly released under a Creative Commons license (no, I did not consider songs which are merely “podsafe”!) and thus can be shared, listened to, and sometimes even modified freely. There’s a great variety in style, mood, and genre of the songs: some traditional, some contemporary, some happy, some sad, and some just plain funny.

MacInTouch has more on a helpful hack for running Final Cut on the latest Macs: “This is indeed a useful workaround, but the initial restriction was not arbitrary.” (See this previous post.)

“The Magic Extractor in Photoshop Elements 4.0 enables you to extract out certain parts of an image while retaining only that part of the image that you need. The tool enables you to perform the extraction in three steps. Within this quick tip, we’ll perform an extraction of a dog.” Educators can get this full-featured photo editor with great discounts, and this tutorial will teach newbies more than just the one technique discussed.

A Macintouch reader provides a nice non-upgrade tip:

I just got a new Power Mac G5 and to my dismay Final Cut Express 2.0.3 refused to start. It complained that I did not have an AGP graphics card. I searched the web to no avail. Everyone just said to upgrade to FCE 3.0.1. I decided to take a peek in the package contents. I found in “Info.plist” a section called “AELRequiredIOPCIDevice”. It was set to “AGP”. I just replaced “AGP” with “PCI” and presto, Final Cut Express 2.0.3 started fine. I’ll now keep my $99 thank you.

A Podcast Quick Tip about file conversion:

If you have a favorite podcast, chances are you want to take the show with you where ever you go. But if you are one of the small 15% of the MP3 player crowd that doesn’t own an iPod , taking some of the fancier (i.e. enhanced) podcasts with you may seem like an impossibility. In this Quick Tip, Stephen Schleicher shows you how to convert a M4B file into something you can burn to CD or put on one of those other music players.

This tip also shows some important options in iTunes’ preferences that are worth knowing. Because there are so many different media formats, it’s important to know as many ways to convert to different formats as possible.

Fromt the Creative Cow Newlsetter:Recapturing HDV, Can it be done?
CreativeCOW.net contributing editor and leader, David Battistella, explores the question of recapturing HDV. He’d seen so many posts, so much talk about HDV format and the problems incurred, so David has taken the time to test a couple of workflows.

I don’t work in HD yet, but I know I’ll need this as a reference sooner or later.

I’ve been working with the design of the site – I have limited skills with HTML and CSS, so I’m depending on the capabilities and generosity of the designers of WordPress Themes. The current 3-coloumn theme appeals to me – it’s similar to the look on the old site, and I can add photos more easily. Not yet, though – the pics you see today came with the theme download, called Relaxation, designed by a blogger named Clemens from Cheltenham, UK.

Onward and upward.

[Addendum, not worth a separate post: I have got to change the highlight color for links and titles from orange to something else, probably the conventional blue. Orange, stylish or not, doesn’t work for me. Just so you know.]

Charles Maurer on the technology and techniques for making good photo prints at home (or in your school): TidBITS: A Feast for the Fridge: Printing Digital Pictures.

Kevin Schmitt reviews Toast 7 Titanium – we’re upgrading the labs here to it.

Toast 7 Titanium packs a host of very useful new features and improvements that continue the proud Toast tradition, and despite the inexplicable continuation of what is perhaps the worst upgrade “deal” in the history of software, is still a good value.